The Angel Titan was never really supposed to be a thing in CCP Games’ spacefaring MMORPG, EVE Online. It started life as a random piece of concept art showcased during an Australian fan meet back in 2017, which was intended as nothing more than a thought experiment. What if the Angel Cartel had a ship so large, so fast, and so powerful that it marks the biggest and most expensive ship ever conceived?
The concept was intriguing, certainly, but it was the aesthetic of the design itself that saw a fever-pitch level of excitement. There was no going back from there; fan opinion was unanimous that they had to have the Angel Titan.
But then… nothing. Years passed by, and the endless question of whether fan hype over the ship would ever amount to anything but hopes and dreams went unanswered. So long were fans waiting, in fact, that the Angel Titan’s appearance reached near meme-level status. It seemed destined to end up as EVE Online’s Titan that got away.
EVE Online’s Angel Titan Was Revealed to Roaring Cheers
That remained true until now. EVE Online’s 20-year anniversary celebrated at Fanfest 23 has finally yielded the announcement that everyone had been waiting for, and boy did they let their excitement be known.
Sitting in the crowd during the keynote, I’m not sure I can recall a louder roar for new content since the old days of E3. The Angel Titan will be available this November along with the new Havoc expansion. It is a really big deal for fans, and so naturally I made sure to ask the devs exactly why.
“A lot of people might have given up hope at this point,” senior game designer Josh Bayer told me ahead of the reveal. “If people have an inkling, it’s because the current storyline of the game heavily involves the Angel Cartel vs. the pirate factions, so it’s possible some people are hoping. But I think generally they won’t suspect anything.”
By the sounds of that raucous applause, exuberant cheers, and one or two joyous expletives, I think Josh’s instinct was on point! And even as a complete EVE Online noob myself, it’s easy to appreciate why the Angel Titan is so kickass. It looks spectacular — even if the comparison made by community developer Peter Farrel to an “evil croissant” is something I now cannot unsee.
In truth, it’s the similarity to the Angel Cartel logo that is actually compelling to true fans of the game. That and the insane firepower and maneuverability the ship possesses, which is designed to allow it to mimic the cartel’s own hit-and-run style of combat. They call it “hyper-dunking,” Peter Farrel tells me.
“It does a lot of damage but it’s also incredibly fast, which is a bit of an anomaly for Titans. These ships are designed for thousand-on-thousand battles, but the Angel methodology is very much about hit-and-run. If this thing finds a capital or a super capital or a jump freighter –any ship that is typically too large for a single ship to take down, this ship will be perfect for that.”
You won’t see many of them, though. The Angel Titan is a whopping five times more expensive than a standard Titan type — so much so that only a couple of hundred of them will ever exist in a game played by around one million monthly players. They’re essentially a status symbol that only the wealthiest players and corporations will own.
Importantly, the arrival of the Angel Titan is yet another prime example of CCP Games listening to its incredibly passionate fanbase. Sure, it’s taken time, but there was never any real question that the developer would eventually deliver. Besides, six years isn’t so long in the grand scheme of things for a game that’s been around for two decades and made by a developer whose wider goal is that EVE remains a persistent sandbox quite literally forever.
EVE Online is available on PC exclusively, but there’s a new 4X strategy spin-off called Galaxy Conquest that launches on mobile later this year. Also announced during Fanfest, CCP is once again trying its hand with a new FPS experience called Vanguard.
